9.1.15
It seems like Wavves frontman Nathan Williams is intent on sharing his entire new album, V, prior to its release——"My Head Hurts" is the fourth one so far, and there's still a month to go before the record (which only has ten tracks) is officially released:
Williams' output as Wavves is so remarkably consistent that it's hard to find something truly remarkable to note about a given song: either you like this sound or you don't, and you don't really need to hear too many different songs to know which camp you belong to. Once you figure it out, you're free to then ignore everything from the band or to feel compelled to immediately purchase the entire catalogue.
As for me, I happen to like the band's sound, so I like this song too. There's really not much left to evaluate once you've answered that core question about the band for yourself.
9.2.15
No new song in the Postcards series from Jens Lekman this week, making, by my estimate, the second week he's missed so far. That still puts us on track to have 50 new song ideas from him this year, though——that is, as long as he doesn't keep making a habit of missing a week every 3 or 4 weeks the rest of the year.
9.3.15 El Vy have shared a second song from Return to the Moon called "I'm the Man to Be":
This feels distinctly different from the National in a way that the first track they shared didn't, and in fact it reminds me a lot of what Morphine might sound like with a guitar instead of a saxophone (Matt Beringer has always had a lot in common with the baritone of Morphine vocalist Mark Sandman, and their similarities are highlighted on Beringer's approach to this song).
On the verge of preordering this one——one more song up to this quality and it's a done deal.
9.4.15
I somehow missed Yacht sharing the title track from their upcoming album I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler a couple of weeks ago, but here it is:
I'm totally on board for a new Yacht album, but this song disappoints me in subtle ways that I'm still trying to define. The closest I can come to describing my reaction is that instead of borrowing from disco and giving it a 21st century update, in a lot of ways this song simply IS disco, from the retro synths, the bass line, and the backing vocals that are uncannily similar to the verses on Blondie's "Rapture", which can hardly be coincidental.
Still, it's highly unlikely that I won't end up owning this record. Maybe I just won't preorder it as early as I would have otherwise.
9.8.15 Jens Lekman, "Postcard #35":
A bouncy, uplifting little number with no lyrics to speak of (although there are some vocal samples). Even though he's missed some weeks, he's on a nice little roll recently.
9.9.15
There are a few albums that I once owned on cassette tape but was never able to find on CD, but that list is trivially small and contains very few albums of any import——records like the Grapes of Wrath'sSeptember Bowl of Green, Broken Homes' self titled debut, and Borgeois Tagg's first release. Albums that were interesting to me at the time, and which I likely would have bought if I had found them on CD within five or six years of their original release, but which haven't compelled me to keep searching for them in the years since then.
The Models' Out of Mind Out of Sight is a different story, however. I was pretty obsessed with that record, and I never really stopped looking for it. As my interest in 80s guitar pop has undergone a real resurgence in the past three or four years (I got really obssessed with the Cars first three albums for a few months), I've renewed my search
for a copy of this album, either digital or on CD, so that I could feel like I had completed the re-collection of all the albums from my early teens that were really important to me.
They were pretty big stars in their native Australia, so the record was available on the Australian version of iTunes, but not on the American one, and I'm not technically savvy enough to know if there's an easy way around buying stuff from the Australian store when I don't have a credit card with Australian address. The CD doesn't seem to pop up on eBay too often, either——cassette and vinyl versions, yes, but CDs not so much.
That left Amazon, which every now and then has a reseller based in Australia selling a CD copy. Typically it was for some outlandish price——$50 plus another $15 or $20 for shipping——but a couple of months ago one popped up for only $30 with $5 shipping, and I had to pull the trigger. The shipping took so long that I almost forgot that I had ordered it, but it finally arrived last week, and fortunately my CD reader had no problem reading the tracks and giving me clean digital copies of each.
I'm still getting reacquainted with it, and of course there's a lot of it that doesn't sound quite as good as it did in my memory (try this with the Thompson Twins sometime if you liked them once but haven't heard their music in a while——there are tons of minor flaws that got smoothed out with the burnishing effects of time's waves), but remains a really great album that I'm very happy to have back in my possession again.
I still can't figure out why these guys didn't achieve the same kind of success as compatriots INXS, who trafficked in a very similar style of music (Out of Mind Out of Sight is every bit as good as the record INXS put out in 1985, Listen Like Thieves, which had their breakthrough hit "What You Need"). I can't tell you to go out and pick this up, because that's fiendishly difficult to do. But still, you should.
9.10.15 Chvrches have shared a third track from their upcoming Every Open Eye, this one titled "Clearest Blue":
The phrase "every open eye" is in the lyrics, so this is essentially the title track, and I was a little underwhelmed at first, especially for the first two minutes or so. But then they kick it into another gear, and it suddenly turns into a truly great song. Still can't wait for this record——it could be one of those rare sophomore releases that is actually better than the phenomenal debut that jumpstarted the band's career.
9.14.15 The Decemberists have announced a new EP, Florasongs, which is a companion piece to this year's What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, and have shared the opening track, "Why Would I Now?":
Beautiful World was my least favorite Decemberists release by a wide margin——this has been one of my favorite bands for more than a decade, and even though they a long hiatus before recording this one, they sounded bored and tired, like they hadn't takena break from writing, recording, and touring in years. The live show redeemed some of the songs and gave me a reason to revisit the material with a more positive attitude, but still, an EP of leftovers from those sessions is not something that I was dying for.
"Why Would I Now?" isn't too bad, though (even though it's still a little too midtempo, too middle of the road, too middling everything compared to their strongest work), and I like it better than about half the songs that made the album. So we'll see what the four tracks that accompany it sound like, but there's at least a chance that this EP will be a worthy addition to their catalogue.
9.15.15 Jens Lekman has gone on a spree the last few days, posting three songs from his Postcards series in the last week. By my count, this gets him back on track to release a song a week for the entire year of 2015. Here's the first, "Postcard #36":
Another in a string of recent strong outings. There's something about the bass line that reminded me immediately of something from OMD'sCrush period, but I frustratingly couldn't pin it to a specific song. The lyrics here are better formed than many of the songs in this series, and I could see this one turning into a real song at some point. Yes, it probably needs another verse or two, and a solid bridge would definitely help, but I really like the bones we can hear already.
9.16.15 Jens Lekman, "Postcard #37":
In a traditional album recording hierarchy, this one would probably remain a b-side, but it would be one that fans would cherish and that might occasionally make the playlist for the live shows. It has a sweet little piano/acoustic guitar riff that breaks up the verses, and it might be one of my favorite songs in this series so far.
9.17.15 Jens Lekman, "Postcard #38":
This song is goofy as hell, and totally endearing. The music is a 33 RPM version of a song from F.S. Blumm called "Flocke" played at 78 RPM with Jens adding a vocal melody and lyrics on top of it. Another keeper; if he keeps going like this, for the last quarter of this experiement, fans are going to come out of this project with 2-3 albums worth of new material that's good enough to deserve a spot in his proper canon.
9.18.15
So...I guess we're releasing albums on Fridays now? I think I missed the memo on this one...
9.21.15
I have found my first new band to obsess over for 2015, and they are PWR BTTM, who just released their debut album, Ugly Cherries, last week.
If you're anything like me, you're going to have to get past the name if you're going to love this band. For starters, the name is ALL CAPS, which I hate. Second, it's written text-speak without any vowels, which I also hate. Third, it references a specific type of role/partner in homosexual intercourse, which is juvenile to the point where you just sort of shake your head——not because of the gay reference, but in exactly the same way you would react if there was a band
who called themselves SWNGNG DCK or BCKDR MN.
But the name, as annoying as I find it, also encapsulates a lot of who the band is at this point in their lives: very young (the duo of Ben Hopkins and Liv Bruce met at Bard College and aren't far removed from their collegiate careers), and with lyrics and live performances emphasize elements from LGBTQ culture——both band members self-identify as queer and they perform in overly-stylized face paint and drag.
But this isn't done as some attention-getting gimick——PWR BTTM is a band who are clearly very comfortable with who they are, and write about their experiences and relationships the same way two hetero men in their early 20s would: unapologetically and without any sense of needing to justify their lifestyles to anyone. Even though the lyrics clearly reference non-hetero relationships and activities, they're done in a casual, no-big-deal way, so that if you draw attention to them as odd for any reason, then it's you making a political statement against this culture, and not the band using its music to be overtly political about their sexuality.
I contrast this to Bob Mould's work in the 80s and early 90s when he was still closeted——even though he wrote about intitmate personal relationships, he never allowed his words to expose his true self (he always used second-person non-gendered pronouns instead of calling his lovers "he" and "him") because there was still some degree of societal shame and subsequent personal self-loathing about being gay at that time. PWR BTTM have no such hang-ups; they are who they are, and when they write about going to CVS to get press-on nails or alternate between calling a boyfriend "my girl" in one line and "him" or "he" in the next, that's because that's true to their real life, day-to-day experience being queer in contemporary American society.
All of this would mean a lot less to me if the music and words weren't fantastic, because that always has to be the starting place for falling in love with a band. It's been a long time since I've been as taken with a song as I was with "West Texas", a preview track from Ugly Cherries that I heard a few days before the record was released. After a couple of listens on YouTube, I preordered the whole album from iTunes and got a download of that song immediately; I commenced to listening to it over and over in the course of the next few days, playing it more than two dozen times before I got the rest of the album.
And the rest of the album didn't disappoint. "West Texas" is still my favorite song, but there are a lot of keepers here. It's hard to pin down the music——there's nothing startlingly new or revelatory, but if this had come around in the early 90s as some offshoot/hybrid of the Pixies (guitar sounds), Pavement (lo-fi), and Pearl Jam (classic rock influences),
that might make some sense.
Anyway. Love, love, love this band. I'm likely going to spend a Saturday night in November driving all the way to Athens to see them be the opening act on a triple bill in a venue that's probably smaller than your average fast food restaurant, and I bet they'll only play for half an hour. The good news there: that will be enough time for them to play this whole album, and maybe they'll come out in the crowd to watch the next two bands and I can buy them a drink.
9.22.15
I really wanted to like the Good Life'sEverybody's Coming Down, or at least to really like (and hopefully even love) a few songs, but, like many of Tim Kasher's releases over the past few years, it's just okay. And just okay doesn't stay in my playlist for very long these days.
9.23.15
I was encouraged by the two tracks that Beirut previewed from their new album, No No No, and was pretty pleased by the way the record started off, but it's definitely one of those albums that is frontloaded. Three of the first four songs are keepers for me ("At Once" didn't do much for me), but then the quality starts to plateau, and there's only one other song on the second half ("Perth") that stays in my head after I'm done listening to it.
So on balance, it's an average record, with five out of nine songs being nothing special. Add to this the fact that it only features nine songs in the first place (and none of them grandiose epics that combine two or three musical ideas——the longest tracks clock in at under four minutes, and there a couple that are shorter than three minutes), and this has the feel of a record that was put out because it had been a few years since the band had released anything and they needed something to tour behind.
I get that this is the way the economics of the industry work sometimes, but I would have been just as happy if they had released an amazing EP comprised of the four keepers and left it at that.
9.24.15
Disturbing trend in my recent purchases/prepurchases: the use of all caps for the band names. PWR BTTM, CHVRCHES, EL VY, AND YACHT all showed up from iTunes with this capitalization, but PWR BTTM are going to be the only ones to keep it when I write about them here.
And maybe YACHT. I don't know. I keep going back and forth on that one.
9.25.15
Okay, so YACHT get to keep their capitalization for now. They have shared a second song from their upcoming new album, this one called "L.A. Plays Itself":
YACHT have always been a band that I've been on the fence about——I usually either adore their songs or just don't care for them at all, but this one splits the difference, with some elements that I really like, and some others that are a little off-putting. And I have a feeling the stuff I don't like as much will grow on me the more I listen to it, mostly because that's what it has already done in the three or four times I've already listened to it.
9.28.15 Broken Bells have released a new single called "It's That Talk Again". Listen below:
I always hope for something more from Broken Bells because I like their two members so much individually (Danger Mouse and the Shins' frontman James Mercer), but so far I've been consistently disappointed. I have a feeling this is one of those bands who are only going to be able to change my mind with a live performance, and even then I'm not sure it would actually change my mind about the recorded versions of the songs.
This song seems pretty much in line with what they've released before in terms of tempo and color tone, but it's a tiny bit livlier, so I guess I like it a tiny bit more. Still, if this were the lead preview for a new album, I wouldn't suddenly be putting the record on my list of things to buy.
9.29.15 Wavves shared a fourth (and likely final——the album comes out next week) preview track from their upcoming album V, this one called "Pony":
It's hard to find a really bad song in the Wavves catalogue, and that's actually one of the problems——many of the songs are the same slightly-better-than-average quality that, when you listen to a whole record's worth at once, you tend to have trouble distinguishing one track from another.
This is another one that will likely fit into that box, and the fact that the tempo is slightly slower and the hooks slightly less addictive than a typical Wavves track means that it will likely be one of the ones that gets very easily crowded out and lost among its neighbors.
